Cambodian Art Emerges From Horrors of a Murderous Past

The Cambodian artist Pich Sopheap at his studio in Phnom Penh.  (Photo: Luke Duggleby)

December 29, 2010
By ROBERT TURNBULL
The New York Times

PHNOM PENH — Slowly but surely, Cambodia’s visual arts’ scene has been emerging from the shadow of the Pol Pot era, nurtured by a clutch of mostly Western-owned galleries dotted around the capital. Years of faith and investment are finally paying off. Moreover, among Phnom Penh’s 40 or so professional artists, two are fetching handsome prices in New York, London and Hong Kong.

Born in 1974 and 1971 respectively, Leang Seckon and Pich Sopheap were infants when civil war and the Khmer Rouge regime combined to kill nearly three million Cambodians. Mr. Pich remembers the chaos that followed Pol Pot’s retreat in 1979, sheltering in ruined pagodas amidst the scarred rice fields of northern Battambang Province.

Mr. Leang hails from the southern region of Svay Rieng, a place that was carpet-bombed by U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War. His foremost memories as a boy tending buffalo are of his mother repairing clothes with fragments of material and of bathing in water he now believes was polluted with Agent Orange.

Mr. Pich and Mr. Leang share their generation’s concerns about the worrying speed of Cambodia’s development — both are being made homeless because the lake around which they have lived and worked has been drained for construction — but there the similarities end: They are wildly different stylistic and aesthetic characters.

Pich Sopheap left Cambodia in 1979. After a spell in France, he graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1995 and received a masters of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On his return to Cambodia in 2003 he and his partner at the time, Linda Saphan, formed Visual Arts Open to encourage local artists and organize an exhibition — the first group showing in Cambodia since the 1960s.

The rediscovery of his country catalyzed a move from painting to sculpture. Using bamboo, wire and rattan, Mr. Pich “weaves” his pieces into a web or grid, a technique that is deceptively simple and, he says, rich in metaphor. “These indigenous materials have concealed strength,” he said, “not unlike Cambodia. One can see through my works and yet they are almost indestructible.”

These personal narratives hover between abstraction and representation, with suggestions of fishing-baskets and other staples of Cambodian life alongside allusions to organs like the stomach and lungs — symbols of strength and fragility for Mr. Pich. A series of “broken” Buddha heads emerged from childhood memories of the destruction of the nation’s religious heritage. At his show “The Pulse Within” at the Tyler Rollins Gallery in New York in 2009, many people were “blown away,” Mr. Pich said. “Some were crying and touching my head. They saw my art as transcending all the usual negative associations, the poverty and all the baggage of Cambodia.”

Here Mr. Pich touches on a sensitive issue. For all the talk of reconciliation and “moving on” after the murderous Khmer Rouge era, some complain that others are still milking the tragedy for what they can. Mr. Pich’s work speaks directly to those who have experienced trauma and loss, but is generally devoid of overt references to the Pol Pot era, images that make Cambodian art “too loud,” he said. He added: “Symbols and references cannot be avoided” in sculpture, “but a degree of abstraction allows more layers of interpretation.”

Mr. Rollins agrees. “Some of Pich’s work refers to the body or bodily organs, so they affect the viewer on a visceral level. Yet however raw the emotional content, it is woven into the structure of the works and never on the surface.”

Interest in Mr. Pich’s work is gathering momentum. The larger pieces at the New York show were sold for as much as $40,000, while a commission for a university in Saudi Arabia netted him $50,000, a world record for a Cambodian artist.

Works by Mr. Pich are in museums in Singapore and Brisbane, Australia, and there are plans to show his work in two U.S. museums next year, starting with a group show at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum in April. His large piece “Compound” will appear at the Singapore Biennale in March.

In contrast to Mr. Pich’s classical exactitude, Leang Seckon wants his work to express “all his feelings about life.” It is quirky and audacious, and in a peculiarly Asian sense, baroque. Traditional symbolism is fused with autobiography in collages and installations that overflow with references to his childhood years, the environment and a pantheon of personal gods and icons, sometimes painted, sometimes glued or even sewn on.

Mr. Leang graduated from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh in 2002 and has shown his work in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and Myanmar. He will be represented at Singapore’s Art Stage next month. Not all viewers will be familiar with the national and personal references in his work, but there is a joy in the execution, and a freedom of fantasy and eccentricity that is ultimately disarming.

In “The God of the Ricefield” (2007) he combines the bodies of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and miniatures of her six children — one of them Cambodian — with the most prominent features of Cambodia’s topography. “From her six breasts and ‘holy navel’ the milk of life flows into Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake, which in turn brings sustenance to the rice fields,” Mr. Leang said. The only Hollywood star to extend a hand to Cambodia, he said, Ms. Jolie represents a kind of ideal, an “earth mother” who will “take care” of Cambodia. “Cupped in the couple’s eight hands are objects that their children and many young people desire, cellphone, limo, computer factory and some Kentucky fried chicken.”

Among about 20 pieces at the Rossi & Rossi Gallery in London in March, most attention was given to “Heavy Skirt,” an installation named after the skirt his mother wore during pregnancy. The garment adorns a maquette of a soldier assembled from a skeleton and the paraphernalia of Cambodia’s numerous wars, from French rifles to U.S. Army helmets and Khmer Rouge shoes made from tires. At the gallery, Mr. Leang said that the genesis of the piece was an exorcism of his childhood fears, illustrated by a performance piece in which he plays himself as a baby emerging from the skirt.

Mr. Leang has a Buddhist’s empathy with the natural world. He was the first among his contemporaries to take the environment as an issue, with the “Rubbish Project,” a naga snake 225 meters, about 740 feet, long, that was made from recycled plastic, mostly discarded bags dumped in the Siem Reap.

Now his work focuses on mourning the loss of the lake and its inhabitants. Eight pieces “giving thanks” to the 19 years he lived there will be shown at Singapore Art Stage in January. The next month the French Cultural Center in Phnom Penh will stage a solo show of his work.

Mr. Pich and Mr. Leang remain focused on their native land, but are equally comfortable with the surge of international interest. As someone schooled in the United States, Mr. Pich has a keen awareness of global art trends. Mr. Leang says he prefers at this stage to remain independent, has yet to sign any binding contracts and, like his beloved Mekong, seems content to go with the flow. But then he has little to worry about — almost everything he produces sells.

Leang Seckon's First European Solo Exhibition Opens at Rossi & Rossi

Leang Seckon, Golden Flower Skirt (2009) Mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010
ArtDaily.org

LONDON.- Rossi & Rossi present Leang Seckon in the artist’s first European solo exhibition. Among the foremost members of the emerging Cambodian contemporary art scene he was born at the onset of the American bombings of Indochina and grew up during the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. As a result of these tumultuous years he was left without a birth certificate and unable to verify his exact age.

In this exhibition the artist will present some twenty paintings and collages centered around a sculptural installation, all based on the theme of the skirt his mother wore during pregnancy and his infancy. Each work contains an allegory wrapped in the memories and personal narratives of Seckon’s childhood and chronicles an undocumented Cambodia. Within the omnipresent spectre of warfare and violence Seckon depicts, there is an irrepressible fire of the spirit and culture of the Cambodian people.

The painting Golden Flower Skirt presents a patchwork of grain silos, flowers and pagodas recalled by the artist as the “golden times” of childhood. The idyllic pastoral scene is overcast by the outline of an American aircraft which he recalls bombing a Buddhist ceremony, killing a monk in the process. Whilst the recollection is visually lush and joyous, the plane’s shadow leaves an indelible and threatening mark.

The Singing Soldier depicts a visceral experience the artist had while viewing his first musical performance in 1982. At the climax of the concert a row of government soldiers who were providing security fired off a salvo of bullets above the heads of the crowd. Although no one was harmed, the event quickly dissolved into chaos. This memory, depicted through a collage of appropriated images and drawings of Cambodian and western pop singers, both past and present, fades almost cinematically into a drawing of an assault rifle juxtaposed next to the artist, dressed in military uniform, singing into a microphone.

As a final example, the installation Heavy Skirt (pictured), which anchors the exhibition, presents a skeleton dressed in a uniform constructed from materials signifying numerous roles in Cambodian society. Both hero and villain, he stands on a pedestal surrounded by the mother’s skirt. Representative of all Cambodians, he is nurtured and cared for by the mother only, inevitably, to grow and change over the course of life into someone she no longer recognises.

Leang Seckon was born in Prey Veng province, Cambodia, in the early 1970s. A 2002 graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh, his works have appeared as illustrations throughout Cambodia and the United States. Noted exhibitions include the 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan in 2009, the ASEAN New Zero Contemporary Art Exchange, Yangon, Myanmar, also in 2009, and his Rubbish Project (2008) a public project in Phnom Penh.

Leang Seckon, Cambodian Freedom Artist

Leang Seckon (Photo: CAMB(L)O(G)DIA)

The Personal Is Political: Q&A With Leang Seckon, Cambodian Freedom Artist

Monday 29 March 2010
By Anne Elizabeth Moore
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Leang Seckon, one of Cambodia's foremost contemporary artists, will see his first European solo exhibition, The Heavy Skirt, opening March 31 at London's Rossi & Rossi gallery. Unlike depictions of his homeland that you might come across in the US, Seckon's work presents a rich and complex view of Cambodia, involving elements of performance, collage, painting and illustration. But it can be confusing, like speaking with the artist himself.

"A problem is me, not perfect English," Seckon tells me when I turn on my tape recorder. But I disagree: The problem is how rarely we take the time to listen.

And Seckon's work is worthy of a close listen. He calls himself a freedom artist and this is no slight pronouncement. Born during Nixon's secret bombing of his homeland, he grew up against the background sound of civil war, spent adolescence under the Khmer Rouge and watched his country's subsequent occupation by the Vietnamese fade into a damaging UN presence and the country's first violent, but democratic elections. His work, whatever the medium, is autobiographical. His freedom and his country's have been hard earned. But neither is complete and Seckon does not shy away from describing the limits to Cambodia's freedom of expression. Yet, he clearly loves his homeland.

"Will you leave the country if the show is successful?" I ask him. His answer is firm.

"Stay in Cambodia," he says.

After all, he honed his skills at Phnom Penh's Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA), taking two Bachelor's degrees in place of the BFA and MFA he might have pursued were the Cambodian higher education system not struggling to catch up to his artistic vision. After finishing school, he held exhibitions throughout Phnom Penh, with group and solo shows at emerging galleries in the city and exhibitions in nearby tourist centers like Phuket, Thailand and Siem Reap, Cambodia. He quickly made the leap to international cities with established art scenes like Fukuoka, Japan and Hong Kong. Back home, his work has been endorsed by two kings.

Still, his first solo exhibition in Europe is a significant milestone for the accomplished Cambodian artist. He gave me a preview in his studio on the doomed Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh.
Anne Elizabeth Moore: Where did the title of the exhibition come from?

Leang Seckon: The Heavy Skirt is the meaning from the life of my mom. When I am a child in the stomach, she wore the skirt, the skirt cover the stomach and cover me. The skirt is of course the time of war. We cannot go out, she have just only one clothes, one [heavily quilted] skirt. So her body heavy and the skirt heavy. When I am born, the time of bomb, heavy life.

I was born in the countryside, Prey Veng Province. I was a buffalo boy. I spent nearly ten years as a buffalo boy. During that time, I wanted to learn art and be an artist. But during that buffalo boy time I never ... during that buffalo boy time, we were poor. We not have anything. We not have bicycle. We not have enough rice. We not have enough clothes, we not have enough anything for living. So I spent the time at the rice field with the buffalo, then when I come to learn art, it was very very very different.

AEM: When did you first come to Phnom Penh to study and leave the rice fields?

LS: I came to Phnom Penh city for the first time in 1992, to learn art at RUFA. I studied traditional painting and interior design for five years. I finished my degree in 2002. Then that year I start to find a way to make art. In 2002 I had [my first] opening at Java Cafe.

AEM: One of your paintings depicts the American bombing of Cambodia. You are a toddler, abandoned in the middle of a rice field, while the countryside burns around you.

LS: The story my mom told me was that when the bomb come from the sky and around the house, she and my brother were in the bunker. She tried to get me but cannot, so she just left me alone outside of the bunker. That is real story of my life. This is story from the mother. But, you know, the sound from the airplane, the sound from the car, the sound from the bomb or the gun, [when I hear them today] I am very shocked and scared. I think this is feeling from that time.

AEM: You also depict the Pol Pot years with collaged images from photographs of Tuol Sleng victims and bodies wrapped as if in cocoons.

LS: Because people were like mummies. I add the black and white scarf, what normally the Khmer Rouge were wearing in Pol Pot time. They wrap the body but they keep the head for getting breath. Like the body cannot move [he acts this out] maybe the face and just they eyes can move and breathe. Everything else is still. Like stuck. Not a freedom at all. Stuck everything. This is what I mean.

I was very very very young. I'm very scared and cry. And very shocked. I compare it to [spending time around] the living dead.

AEM: Several of your previous projects including The Rubbish Project [http://therubbishproject.blogspot.com/] and some works in this exhibition focus on environmental concerns, which are frequently ignored as the country develops.

LS: I spent nearly ten years as a buffalo boy and I love nature so much. I need nature, I need water, I need [he breathes deeply] fresh air for free. I heard from the TV a few days ago, the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Samdech Hun Sen, he's very upset when the people cut down the tree. He's very supportive of finding the money and people to look after the tree. He very upset. Especially for the fish in the big lake, too.

So I am here, my studio on Boeung Kak Lake, the most important lake in Phnom Penh. But [laughs] the government destroy. Not the government, but the company buy the lake and destroy the lake. I not feel happy at all because I spent 8 years on the lake to get energy for make my art work. So I can relax to make a painting.

AEM: The arts are still re-emerging in Cambodia, but in the realm of journalism, reporters who criticize the government are regularly threatened or worse. Does this make you nervous?

LS: My art is respect. I don't want to attack back. I want to say something gentle and not attack, but let people know that they did something wrong. But I don't want any people - any people - hurt by me. I just try to make you understand that what you did to me is painful and you try to understand by yourself that this is what you did to me. History is treachery. It is already done, but I want to show the people what happened in past time and they can understand more deeply about the present in art.

Between good luck or bad luck is activity, what activity they are doing. I can say to you, like, I respect you, but behave toward you like I'm trying to kill you. This is the meaning, you know?

Cambodia is worried. It's not very safe at all right now. What I want to focus on at this point is about my mom's experience and my life's start and how I grew up until now. Because I have never used my own experience in artwork. This is my own language and my own experience and my own life. But all of this work is of course about war, about the environment, about life and about culture.

Cambodian art: Past to present

Leang Seckon's "Prison Guard" depicts Duch, who is facing a genocide tribunal starting Tuesday.
Sopheap Pich's "Cycle 2" depicts joined stomachs showing the ties and strains of communities.

Story Highlights

• Fourteen artists, ranging in age and practice, displaying their works
• One work depicts Duch, a former Khmer Rouge leader facing genocide tribunal
• Cambodia's arts were stunted by the 1970s genocide and civil war
• Some 50 artists now practicing their craft in the Southeast Asian country

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
By Miranda Leitsinger

Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Bamboo, woven into the shape of human stomachs. Red, sky blue and orange pencil shavings glued onto a large canvas form a woman's traditional hair clip. A collage of magazine clippings, drawings and found materials depict Cambodia's tumultuous modern history.

These are a few of the offerings on hand in Hong Kong at one of the first large international exhibitions of artists from Cambodia. The work by 14 artists varies in practice-- video, photography, collage, wood shavings, paper, bamboo and painting-- as well as in themes, from reflecting on the Southeast Asian nation's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime to the emerging modern Cambodia, with traffic lights and all.

"Every artist in this show is referencing ancient tradition and recent history," said Phnom Penh-based curator Erin Gleeson, noting the wall-size depiction in folded paper of the serpent Naga (which in Cambodian culture represents the people's mythical birth) to a collage of 20th-century Cambodia and its six different regime changes.

"The show is looking at the present -- 'Forever Until Now' is the title -- and it is this lineage of the past, you see that in the show, and then you see artists that arrive at the present," she added.

The show opens Friday and runs through March 22 at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. Gallery owner and director Katie de Tilly said she believed it was important the artists get international exposure.

" ... it's really at the beginning of their art emergence. Obviously, they've had a very hard history," she said. "This is really the beginning of contemporary Cambodians who are expressing very original ideas in their artworks and I think that that's what makes it very unique and to show to the rest of the world."

Cambodia, which lost an estimated one-quarter of its population or at least 1.7 million people -- including an estimated 90 percent of its artists -- under the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime, has a small but growing artistic community: there are some 50 practicing artists out of its 14 million people, Gleeson said.

The genocide and ensuing war, which only ended in the last decade or so, stifled the development of the arts in one of the world's poorest countries.

"The legacy of that is now in every facet of a developing society," said Gleeson, who noted the country had no art books when she arrived in 2002 on a fellowship to teach art history. "There's an absence of infrastructure for them, there's an absence of materials, there is no art store. ... they are quite inventive about mixing materials to make them of a higher quality or last longer, but in many cases they don't know archival techniques."

The harsh weather conditions -- a dusty, hot season and a rainy monsoon -- add to the trying work conditions.

"Everything's against them," she added. "Their parents in many cases are coming from a really disadvantaged background, as the majority of the country is economically."

Some of the art included in the show looks at the Cambodia of today, such as Leang Seckon's "Three Greens" -- an acrylic painting showing children in school uniform crossing a road with a yellow light, red light and three green lights, along with cows and roosters. The piece shows the changes in a country that recently got stop lights, with animals, people and traffic mingling on the main roads of the capital.

Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian-American whose family migrated to the U.S. in 1984, works with bamboo and rattan -- materials often used in Cambodian traditional farming and crafts -- to make sculptures.

His work, "Cycle 2," is the joining of the stomachs of an infant and an elderly person that for him brought up ideas of Cambodian traditional village life.

"You belong to each other, you help each other out," he said. "But also, if you look at the lines and you see how it's shaped by hand, it's not very perfect, so it's also about struggle...

"You could say it's a cycle of trying to hold onto each other, now we are living everywhere in the world, Cambodians are all over the planet," he added. "All this technique and pattern that I am quite obsessed with ... it's about this idea of trying to hold on with very simple means."

Chan Dany, a 25-year-old artist who graduated from one of the country's three art schools, creates textured patterns that appear almost like tapestry using pencil shavings in various colors. The works on display in the show are from a series based on Cambodian architectural decor, such as door and window shutter carvings, and include ancient Khmer forms whose shapes are derived from nature.

"When I started learning art, the teacher introduced a lot of new ways of making art, new ideas that were very difficult for me, so I had to think a lot," he said through a translator. "So then I looked around at what my classmates were doing and I started to think about what they weren't using for their work, so I started to collect the things that they didn't use when they were making art and started to think about my way of making art using those materials."

"I like the first piece I did (using the pencil shaving technique) because I had never done it this way before and since then I kept on making it," he said.

The younger artists "seem to be expressing something more fresh," while the work by artists from the older generation is "much more heavy," de Tilly said.

Some of the works of the Khmer Rouge period include a painting by Vann Nath, one of seven people to survive the regime's infamous S-21 torture prison. His painting, "Pray for Peace," depicts women wearing traditional Cambodian funeral scarves praying en masse under troubled skies by stormy seas.

Another work, Leang's "Prison Guard," tells the life of Duch, a former teacher who ran S-21 and goes on trial Tuesday before a U.N.-backed tribunal on charges that include crimes against humanity.

The art scene has been growing slowly in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh over the last few years: Sopheap started a group to promote contemporary Cambodian art practices and two art institutes offer programs apart from the Royal University of Fine Arts.

One factor that has also made Cambodian contemporary artists different from their counterparts, for example in neighboring Vietnam, has been the lack of outside influence, such as was the case with Chinese contemporary art 30 years ago, de Tilly said.

"Cambodia still is very much influenced by itself and so the development is happening on a slower pace but as well very interesting," she said. "They seem to not have as much international exposure to materials, magazines, publications, so you really do feel -- it was the same just after the Cultural Revolution in China -- that they didn't have exposure to many publications and things, and so their art was developing at that moment in time."

" ... it's very interesting to document it and see what's going to happen in the future," she said.

Part of the exhibit will be shown at another of the gallery's venues in Hong Kong and will run through April 25.

A Naga to save the environment

Part of the Naga above the Siem Reap river (Photo: The Rubbish Project)
Volunteers helping to build the Naga (Photo: The Rubbish Project)
Volunteers helping to build the Naga (Photo: The Rubbish Project)
Volunteers at work (Photo: The Rubbish Project)

20 March 2008
By Marie Giffard
Cambodge Soir Hebdo
Translated from French by Luc Sâr

On Saturday 22 March, a Naga made out of rubbish will rise from the water in Siem Reap to celebrate the World Water Day and to denounce pollution in Cambodia.

For the occasion of the World Water Day, on 22 March 2008, The Rubbish Project, in partnership with the environmental group World Wildlife Fund (WWF), will build a 200-meter long snake made out of locally produced rattan, collected plastic material and other materials collected from garbage cans. The concept was centered around a Naga, a mythical water snake, in order to sensitize the population on the state of water streams and rivers in the kingdom. “The Naga plays a central role in the Cambodian culture, it is also present in religion as well, when the Naga saved Buddha by lifting him up from the flooding water while he was meditating,” Seckon, one of the organizers, explained.

The Naga should rise from the Siem Reap river, next the Angkor temples. The Rubbish Project was set up in 2006 by artists Fleur Smith and Leang Seckon, to attract the public attention, through arts, on environmental issues.

“We hope that people, when they see this, understand that this snake was made out of rubbish and water pollution, and that, if this persists, the Naga and all that can be found in the river will disappear,” the artist insists. “WWF also hopes to show the efficiency of rattan as a flexible construction material,” Dr. Koy Ra, the director of Rattan Project at the WWF Cambodia, declared.

Additional information can be found at:
http://www.therubbishproject.blogspot.com

Local Painter's Exhibition Sees Life Through Skin

Magical Medicine - Painting by Leang Seckon (Photo: JavaArts.org)

By Seng Ratana, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
10 March 2008

A new exhibition by local artist Leang Seckon seeks to teach its viewers more about themselves through their own skin, and the skin of others.

"All people stand in front of mirrors to see their faces, complexion and appearance several times a day, and they always notice the unsatisfactory defects," Leang Seckon said, opening his exhibition, "Skin," which opened March 6 and will continue through the month of March.

The show incorporates paintings on several types of skin, including snake.

Only 30 years old, Leang Seckon, has long had experience in painting and is recognized by the international community.

His paintings hang in the national museums of the US and Singapore, and he has sold paintings to patrons from many countries.

Reactions to his latest exhibition varied on Thursday's opening.

Hor Vireak said at the exhibition opening he didn't understand the paintings and maybe needed one month more to do so.

Fleur Smith, from New Zealand, said that the skin sent a message, that even though we have different skin and different colors, we can all be friends and should not discriminate.

Minister of Tourism Thong Khon said that the paintings were good for foreigners as well as Cambodia's young generation.